>dialectical image
what did he mean by this
Dialectical image
Nolan Richardson
Zachary Williams
semions?
Thomas Howard
It's very cryptic, but something like dialectics not happening temporally as in Hegel but at a standstill. The dispersed fragments of history contain multiplicities of layers/meanings that dialectically play into eachother. But they are grasped in moments, where a fragment of history flashes up in the mind's eye of the dialectical materialist.
It plays into and is connected to his critique of narrative in historiography and linearity in time as inherently authoritarian. History breaks down into images, not stories. Dialectics are not about grasping a progressive ordering in the linearity of historical time (hegel/marx), it is about grasping the rubble of history as it fractures up momentarily and to create something new out of it through child-like play.
Tyler Ortiz
And to re-present history by working through the multiplicities/layers of meaning in the fragments of history, to save what has been hidden by the 'fascist' tradition
Daniel Wood
Inreresting. So where Hegel sees a historical process of continual self-determiation, and Marx a process of capital accumulation, Benjamin implores us to view it as the Angel of History would -- an image, or pile of rubble, of fragmented meaning?
Carter Evans
In short terms, yes.
Now, in the arcades project, when he is describing the images of fashion and the commodity as dialectical image, he introduces several layers to the topography of the dialectical image. It is written very cryptically and of course it is also dispersed in fragments (since we only have the passagen-werk in fragments), so it is hard to make a coherent or systematic theory out of it. (And perhaps this is also the point for Benjamin?).
One who does a good job though, to try and assemble the fragments of the arcades project into something like a coherent theory is Susan Buck-Morss. Her book on Benjamin has some pretty interesting illustrations and graphs of how you could envision Benjamin's theory of the dialectical image in a topographic sense.
Jonathan Garcia
>Susan Buck-Morss
any recs for further reading? This concept is dense, perhaps even incomplete. Have you read pic related?
Hunter Bell
Cake boss!
Eli Gray
Yes, it's the one I was refering to. It's one of the best pieces of secondary lit on Benjamin out there.
His namesake Andrew Benjamin has also written extensively on him.
Christian Lewis
Se he's pretty much Deleuze?
Adam Thomas
To aid you a bit, this is what I remember (and I may have some parts mixed up a bit) from his talk of the commodity as dialectical image in the passagen-werk.(And Buck-Morss' talk of it). Now it is important to remember that I'm not describing anything that should be thought of as processual here. All these layers of the image are frozen at a standstill and play into eachother in a momentary event (jetzt-zeit).
Basically the dialectical image is comprised of two stages; dreaming (as history past) and waking (as it re-presents itself to the dialectical materialist). It also has a material and an immaterial component, although these cannot be thought of as separate.
In the dreaming stage, physiognomically/materially the dialectical image is a part of the ruin of history, while immaterially it is a wish-image that makes claim to the future. In the waking stage it physiognomically becomes an excavated fossil (think archaeology/digging through the rubble) and immaterially becomes an allegory.
The commodity in the dreaming stage on the one hand is a phantasmogoria of false consciousness. This is classic marxist critique of commodity fetichism and alienation. But the joy that exactly was bound to the commodity through the result of the alienation of needs becomes a wish-image for the revolutionary moment that will release it. This makes claim to the present.
As the image of the historical commodity re-presents itself in the waking stage as fossil/allegory, the dialectical materialist releases this joyous revolutionary power and history becomes redeemed.
This ties into his messianism, his idea of messianic time as a temporal break out of linearity and every generation being equipped with messianic power. The dialectical materialist then becomes a messianic figure.
Hopefully you can see that he differs from the classic marxist idea of the satisfaction connected to consumption of the commodity as only false consciousness. For Benjamin there is a force tied to the commodity that cries out to be released and when it is, it becomes the joyous power behind the revolution. Also, there are definite kabbalistic undertones of tikkun and jewish messianism.
Hunter Long
benjamin was totally a (mostly closet) jewish messianist
his "theologo-politico fragment" included in "One way Street" is very explicitly messianistic, but distinguishes between revolution of the worldly order and the return of the messiah in relation to spirituality
Alexander James
No, not really.
Cameron Anderson
This is difficult to understand. How can something --dialectic-- be both happening and at a standstill. His account of history is difficult to interpret. Is this meant to be a positive claim?
Blake Cruz
Is it possible to ever understand the dialectic without being German
Landon Cooper
Dialectics traditionally (Hegel/Marx) is a linear movement where the progression follows an orderliness. Thus we can make out the movements of time/history/thought in a reasonable narrative.
Benjamin rejects the notion of progress (liberal/marxist or whatever may be) as well as linear time and narrative in history as inherently tied to an authoritarian impulse, because it favours the ruling of the present. Narratology is always an act of barbarism on behalf of the victors of history.
Rather, Benjamin wants to consider history as a kind of aesthetic phenomenon, or an Event that on the one hand 'happens to us' and that we partake in on the other.
This is the dialectical image as the Event of a fragment of ruinous history re-presenting itself in a flash and being redeemed through the dialectic interplay with the present. But this is NOT processual, for it is not to be thought of in terms of linearity, the dialectical image as Event is a moment of temporal break. As Benjamin says it 'the dream itself is only realized in the moment of awakening from it'. It is trying to conceive of history in a way that is non-linear and doesn't lend itself to fascist appropriation.
Gabriel Gonzalez
>"identity of identity and non-identity
>"non-identity of identity and non-identity
What
Adrian Barnes
Academic banter. Just means there's no subsumption under an ideal whole. Just a mass of contradictory fragments that you have to make some sense of on your own.
Jacob Perez
Pic related
Nathaniel Carter
He could just cut to the chase and say Subjective Idealism is the way to the truth and that History is the abjection of Jesus/Atman/You/Me.
Ryan Moore
...
Brandon Wilson
Am I wrong for seeing a lot of Pauline messianism in Benjamin? Messianic time just seems like Christianity.
Colton Hernandez
You are certainly not the first. This is the claim of Jacob Taubes; that Benjamin is a pauline through and through. Agamben has a book wherein he discusses this (titled 'the time that remains').
Julian Adams
>Benjamin rejects the notion of progress (liberal/marxist or whatever may be) as well as linear time and narrative in history as inherently tied to an authoritarian impulse, because it favours the ruling of the present. Narratology is always an act of barbarism on behalf of the victors of history.
Would you happen to have a quote or reference on this? Is this is passagenwerk?
Gabriel Mitchell
I assume it was one of his secret judeo-masonic kabbalah techniques for genociding the white race.
Benjamin Stewart
Theses on the philosophy of history / Über den Begriff der Geschichte. It's a rather short text, and the last he wrote, a couple of months before he committed suicide on the french-spanish border after being stopped by border control fleeing the nazis.
Jacob Harris
Uh, yeah, I see, I totally get it now.
Nathaniel Powell
>1. "There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain."
>2. "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable."
Nicholas Jackson
>His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.
I have yet to read something so allegorically inaccessible that I hesitate to interpret it. Not even Nietzsche was this mystic. Does this Angel's futile attempt of "awakening the dead" have any relation to your definition of Dialectical Image as it pertains to "wish-image"?
Joshua Jones
Are you seriously incapable of constellating everything that's already been written in this thread with that passage? Do you have a brain injury? I'm really not trying to be mean, but you're either incredibly thick or you're trying to instigate a flame war.
Camden Hill
No. What's missing is a justification for any of this because none of it is believable at face value.
John Russell
What are you looking for? An objective correlate for what Benjamin has written? 'Verification'? It's speculative poetry, not a case study. Either the language and imagery shifts something inside you or or doesn't. If it doesn't, move on. Nobody needs to justify anything to you.
Logan Green
It is important to remember that this 'construction' of a topography for the dialectical image is based on his particular analysis of the commodity in 18th-century Paris as a dialectical image. Wish-image is the layer of the dialectical image that pertains to the unconscious layer of the dream-image, wherein the joyous force that has been bound/chained to the commodity through false consciousness wishes to be unchained and redeemed. This is realized in the waking stage, through the allegorical reading of the ruinous commodity as fossil (trace).
You could say that the wish-image layer of the dialectical image pertains to the call from the past or the claim that it makes on the present to be redeemed. Then the aesthetic encounter with history in the event of the dialectical image precisely is a moment of attempting to assemble the debris / redeem the dead.
You could say that Klee's Angelus Novus becomes an emblematic symbol of the historian as the revolutionary messiah that works to redeem the fractured past from the storm of progress/fascism.
Christian Butler
You are way too patient.
John Hernandez
Yes, I've heard that before.
Nathaniel Walker
I'm asking these questions for a reason. If you want to feel instigated that's not my problem.
Thank you.